Recent reviews by cantbehelped

Overall, it's great. There are some narrative decisions I didn't like but overall it was the most JRPG-like RPG from a western dev I've played. I liked that the storytelling and dialogue was told in a more "timeless" manner rather than the "quips, jokes, irony" manner you see from many other indie RPGs. For the most part, that is- occasionally you get a "F*ck, I fking fked it up" from a character but I generally laughed those moments off rather then cringed.

The music is a great blend of dozens of styles, smart use of leitmotif and melody callbacks and overall it had me recalling masterpiece OSTs like NieR, Final Fantasy and others. It blends orchestral hallmarks with weird, strange, and interesting musical textures and even has many tracks I would call "decidedly videogamey" which is a good thing in this day and age where it's too easy for soundtracks to default to "samey Hollywood orchestra, cinematic and operatic" to feign a sort of grandiosity while doing nothing special musically. Expedition 33 manages to avoid this problem in my opinion.

Graphically, I was super glad the game unashamedly had FMVs, which reminded me of the old PS1/PS2 and early PS3 RPG days when you would be rewarded with a cinematic for beating hard bosses. The dissonance between your characters wearing cosmetics and being in their default state in the FMV had me feeling nostalgic for a bygone era of RPG, so I really appreciated that. While the FMVs look amazing, the in game custcenes and graphics ranged from looking wonky to looking amazing depending on the lighting and camera angle. Gustave, as much as I love the guy, seemed to look wonky in certain shots, as if his head was too big for the body they gave him. Whether it's an optical illusion or a design choice, I won't speculate. It's fine though, because the RPGs of olde are guilty of the same sort of character jankiness, and in Expedition 33's defense it isn't all the time.

I did get a bit frustrated, mainly towards the endgame, when bosses would bust out their new 7 hit combos that I have yet to ever see and of course I failed to dodge them and just ate the 3000 damage. It's easy to get pretty tilted at the boss fights when they pull that crap, but for the most part no battle is unwinnable even going in blind. One of the last few dungeons was egregiously long in my opinion... Like a "final dungeon doing call backs to every past area" type of dungeon, only to beat the big boss and the game goes "so anyway, here's Act 3 actually" and the game continues. Thankfully, the length of dungeons balloon only towards the end. The rest of the game rolls by at a decent pace. That said, I didn't feel the burning desire to tackle any optional content after rolling credits.

It's worth playing.